7 ms·

World IPv6 Day: firing up the engines on the new Internet protocol

71 points by atularora 16y ago

mootothemax 16y ago
A handy quick test of your current IPv6 readiness is to try Google IPv6: http://ipv6.google.com/ http://ipv6.google.com/ Sadly it doesn't work for me - for curiosity's sake I'm now going to try via Lynx from my servers :)
- zaphoyd 16y ago
  http://test-ipv6.com/ http://test-ipv6.com/ gives you a bit more info about exactly what is working and what isn't in regards to your v6 connection.
  - phirephly 16y ago
    So I'm on Toredo, which means IPv6 works, but it says I can't visit IPv6 websites, which I understand to be a DNS issue. Any hints on how to get that working?
    - trezor 16y ago
      Google is selective about exposing IPv6 DNS entries. Your ISP has to be in the Google IPv6 program which means that Google trusts your ISP to provide quality IPv6 connectivity. Basically, Google don't want half-assed IPv6 networking setups tainting their brand as unreliable if for instance Bing works (having only IPv4), but Google is slow or inaccessible. It's understandable from a marketing point of view, but IMO a pretty coward stance on employing new technology. I'm using Google services over IPv6, but the reason I can do that is because I run my own bind instance and have specifically added the Google IPv6 forwarding entries: Should you have IPv6 and bind, here is what they look like: zone "google.com" IN { type forward; forward first; forwarders { 2001:4de0:1000:a4::2; 2001:4de0:1000:a3::2; }; }; Other than that, reasons for not reaching IPv6-sites, even if you have IPv6 enabled is that (at least) Chrome is very selective about IPv6 support. It may accept IPv6-only sites if the position of the moon is right relative to the suns orbit around the milky way. With Firefox this isn't really an issue, but Google has tried really hard to avoid IPv6 being used with Chrome. For instance: If you are on a tunnelled IPv6 connection (i.e. non-native, like teredo) it will attempt to detect this and block IPv6-connectivity because Google has chosen for you that this may provide an inferior web-experience with higher latency compared to plain IPv4, if available. Google's IPv6-efforts so far, while I could give them credit for at least have taken a few baby-steps, is by far the most cowardly I have seen anyone take. I find it very hard to applaud them.
      - zaphoyd 16y ago
        Lets hope "World IPv6 Day" goes smoothly enough that they can drop some of those restrictions. =)
        trezor 16y ago
        Indeed. I wish, just like for Firefox, there was an extension which could tell me what protocol I am using. As far as I know, Firefox does not discriminate nor positively favor neither IPv6 or IPv4. So far, this is what has given me the best IPv6 experience, and I'm very disappointed Google/Chrome has decided to do their best to conceal from the internet that there are users out there, and that they are ready. IPv6 deployment is largely a chicken and the egg type of problem and IMO this decision doesn't really help.
- wildmXranat 16y ago
  There could some issues for home users such as me(Rogers internet): Error 105 (net::ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED): The server could not be found. Which is probably related to dns resolution.
  - uxp 16y ago
    ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED is Chrome's DNS Timeout. The same error will occur if you navigate to a webpage without an internet connection.
    - pyre 16y ago
      Unfortunately this is true of 'localhost' when you have no internet connection if you don't pass the '--enable-ipv6' flag to Chrome. Oddly enough it also happens for 127.0.0.1, which it shouldn't be doing DNS lookup for at all.
- there 16y ago
  or go to http://www.kame.net/ http://www.kame.net/ and see the dancing kame!
mike-cardwell 16y ago
IPv6 really isn't that difficult. It only takes a few minutes to get a free IPv6 address from a tunnel broker and add it to your server. My websites and email were all dual stack less than 24 hours after I started looking into IPv6 for the first time. I wrote a blog post about it last year: https://secure.grepular.com/Setting_up_IPv6_is_Easier_Than_You_Think https://secure.grepular.com/Setting_up_IPv6_is_Easier_Than_Y... If you get a cert error it's because the certificate is signed by cacert.org and several major browser/os combos don't have their root yet.
- mey 16y ago
  A free tunnel broker isn't going to support the traffic of something like google. And an issue Google has previously run into is, clients getting the incorrect DNS entry and trying to connect across to a ipv6 interface instead of ipv4. This is one of the reasons why google had/has that ipv6.google.com dns name.
  - mike-cardwell 16y ago
    If I wasn't clear, I wasn't suggesting that massive websites use free tunnel brokers. I was suggesting that geeks set up their own services with ipv6 capability in order to learn how it works so they know what to do when it becomes more important.
    - mey 16y ago
      Thanks for the clarification :)
- btilly 16y ago
  Congratulations. Now more people are unable to access your website and email because of known bugs with dual stacks than are likely to access your website and email through ipv6. The main issue are people whose setup says that they will connect preferentially via ipv6, who try to connect because their operating system has support for it, but whose IP provider does not have support. See http://getipv6.info/index.php/Customer_problems_that_could_occur http://getipv6.info/index.php/Customer_problems_that_could_o... for more potential problems you've created. Of course this is a kind of problem that needs to get fixed before ipv6 can be broadly adopted. Which is why this ipv6 days is going to happen.
Roritharr 16y ago
it seems my isp won't provide native ipv6 addresses until they are somehow forced to... -_-
AndrewDucker 16y ago
Now, if only my router supported IPv6. Sadly, it doesn't seem to come out of the box on any home-oriented routers.
- simonsarris 16y ago
  On any? My WRT610N ($160 on amazon) seems to work fine for ipv6.google.com and I have not configured anything. I would hope all new linksys are similar, but a quick search makes it look like the WRT300N does not support v6.
  - AndrewDucker 16y ago
    I also have an WRT610N, but I'm failing tests here: http://test-ipv6.com/ http://test-ipv6.com/ I can also see ipv6.google.com, but I know my ISP doesn't do IPv6.
- jbester 16y ago
  DD-WRT firmware supports it in certain firmware versions. A little start up script hacking is required, but, you can setup a ipv6 tunnel through hurricane electric or one of the other tunnel brokers.
- zaphoyd 16y ago
  This is actually not true anymore. Off the top of my head all Apple Airport Express/Extreme/Time Capsule routers, DLink 601/655/855, linksys WRT610N/E3000. All support IPv6, most of those let you configure the router as 6to4 or 6in4 (tunnelbroker, etc) tunnel endpoint as well. The DLink ones even support a stateful DHCPv6 server to provide specific v6 address ranges to your LAN clients. The support on the most recent revisions often isn't just limited to firmware either. The Dlink routers have IPv6 ready logos on the box and instructions for IPv6 features in the manual. You can pick these routers up in your local Best Buy or Office Depot and the v6 support is not limited to the high end ones either. I am sure there are more than those that I have listed, they are just the ones that I have personally used for home IPv6 stuff.
  - 16y ago
drtse4 16y ago
I'm wondering if one day, the real necessity to switch to ipv6 fast (after years of experiments) and the fear for possible connectivity issues will create a y2k effect among the population...
- uxp 16y ago
  Reminds me of the busysignal I'd get after dialing into Prodigy. "Please wait while we allocate an IP address for your internet connection."
steadicat 16y ago
Google: “Though IPv4 plays an important role in the Internet, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the protocol will be removed and our resources directed towards completely new technologies, such as IPv6.”
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
  - steadicat 16y ago
    It's satire. In some ways, the reasoning that led Google to drop support for H.264, if taken to extremes, could be used to support the logic of dropping IPv4. I was merely pointing out, in a funny way, the parallel between the two situations, and the absurdity of the original H.264 decision. For another example of related satire, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095993 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095993, which got 59 upvotes and made the front page.
zacharycohn 16y ago
According to http://twitter.com/#!/IPv4Countdown http://twitter.com/#!/IPv4Countdown, we will run out of IPv4 addresses in about a month. Won't June already be a few months past when we run out?
- zaphoyd 16y ago
  That counter is when global registries have allocated everything, not strictly when all useable addresses are in use. IPv4 addresses will never "run out", they will just get more expensive and complicated to use until the point where IPv6 is cheaper and easier. IANA exhaustion is just one big milestone along that path.
  - zacharycohn 16y ago
    Ah, I see. Thanks for the explanation! I assumed that this was counting how many are in use/assigned, versus simply allocated.
apu 16y ago
After roughly 8 years, how do DJB's predictions/comments hold up on ipv6? http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html
- requinot59 16y ago
  "The IPv6 designers made a fundamental conceptual mistake: they designed the IPv6 address space as an alternative to the IPv4 address space, rather than an extension to the IPv4 address space." -- djb (emphasis mine) It's true that it would have make sense to embed IPv4 address space into IPv6!
  - zokier 16y ago
    Kinda like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#IPv4-mapped_IPv6_addresses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#IPv4-mapped_IPv6_addresses ? edit: Actually, now that I think about it, accessing IPv4 internet from IPv6-only LAN should be almost trivial. Lets say you happen to have 3000::0 IPv6 network completely unused, which also fits the entire IPv4 address space. Then you could configure your DNS server to respond to AAAA queries for domains that have only A records with an corresponding IPv6 in your free block. Ie news.ycombinator.com(174.132.225.106) would become 3000::ae84:e16a or something like that. Then your router which is default gw for the hosts receives a package destined to that special network, it takes the payload and puts it into a IPv4 packet with destination decoded from the IPv6 address. It seems kinda obvious approach, wouldn't require any modification of the hosts or to the internet. Of course I don't know why anyone would want to run a IPv6 only LAN instead of mixed v4/v6, but maybe there is some reason to. Are there some problems that I haven't noticed? Surely someone must have thought about this before.
    - wmf 16y ago
      What you're describing is basically NAT64.
    - zaphoyd 16y ago
      This is referred to as NAT64/DNS64 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_transition_mechanisms#NAT64 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_transition_mechanisms#NAT6...) and is the strategy many mobile phone networks (such as T-Mobile USA) are taking. Effectively they give devices IPv6 addresses only and run a DNS server that makes up "fake" IPv6 addresses for all of the v4 only DNS records. It works well except when applications embed IPv4 literals (as they won't go through the DNS system and get translated)
gimpf 16y ago
Related: The Germany-based IT book and magazine publisher Heise (http://www.heise.de http://www.heise.de) did this back on 2010-09. The test has been such a success (practically no problems, for their share of readers, though) that they made that permanent. They wrote that those Big Guys had asked them on their experiences. Maybe this actually works out. (Source, German: @ http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Globaler-Test-fuer-das-Internet-der-Zukunft-1168595.html http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Globaler-Test-fuer-da...)
- zaphoyd 16y ago
  The Norwegian companies A-Pressen Digitale Medier (http://www.apdm.no/ http://www.apdm.no/) and VG Multimedia (http://www.vg.no/ http://www.vg.no/), both news publishers with non-technical audiences, had similar experiences. The IT group that helped them set it up published the results of their experience and brokenness testing here: http://fud.no/ipv6/ http://fud.no/ipv6/
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
moxiemk1 16y ago
Here at Carnegie Mellon University, we're allocated routable IPv4 addresses (and real DNS entries) for each MAC address you connect to the campus network with. As far as I can tell, I have zero support for IPv6. Autoconf doesn't work at all, and I'm unable to find any documentation about it. Sigh.
pavel 16y ago
Here's a start-up idea: an IPv4 address market/exchange (unless something like this already exists)
- wmf 16y ago
  https://www.arin.net/resources/transfer_listing/ https://www.arin.net/resources/transfer_listing/ (IPbay does have a nice ring to it, though.)
- lookforipv6 16y ago
  it's not as easy as that, and not very new idea. Some RIRs (Regional Internet Registries) do not allow that. you would need to find some legacy space to do it, which it may be hard. and then some buyers. also you only have a few years to recover your investment, by the time ipv4 is finished (not the IANA pool, but the actually stock from rirs), probably ipv6 would be a reality.

71 points by atularora 16y ago

A handy quick test of your current IPv6 readiness is to try Google IPv6: http://ipv6.google.com/ http://ipv6.google.com/ Sadly it doesn't work for me - for curiosity's sake I'm now going to try via Lynx from my servers :)

zaphoyd 16y ago
http://test-ipv6.com/ http://test-ipv6.com/ gives you a bit more info about exactly what is working and what isn't in regards to your v6 connection.
- phirephly 16y ago
  So I'm on Toredo, which means IPv6 works, but it says I can't visit IPv6 websites, which I understand to be a DNS issue. Any hints on how to get that working?
  - trezor 16y ago
    Google is selective about exposing IPv6 DNS entries. Your ISP has to be in the Google IPv6 program which means that Google trusts your ISP to provide quality IPv6 connectivity. Basically, Google don't want half-assed IPv6 networking setups tainting their brand as unreliable if for instance Bing works (having only IPv4), but Google is slow or inaccessible. It's understandable from a marketing point of view, but IMO a pretty coward stance on employing new technology. I'm using Google services over IPv6, but the reason I can do that is because I run my own bind instance and have specifically added the Google IPv6 forwarding entries: Should you have IPv6 and bind, here is what they look like: zone "google.com" IN { type forward; forward first; forwarders { 2001:4de0:1000:a4::2; 2001:4de0:1000:a3::2; }; }; Other than that, reasons for not reaching IPv6-sites, even if you have IPv6 enabled is that (at least) Chrome is very selective about IPv6 support. It may accept IPv6-only sites if the position of the moon is right relative to the suns orbit around the milky way. With Firefox this isn't really an issue, but Google has tried really hard to avoid IPv6 being used with Chrome. For instance: If you are on a tunnelled IPv6 connection (i.e. non-native, like teredo) it will attempt to detect this and block IPv6-connectivity because Google has chosen for you that this may provide an inferior web-experience with higher latency compared to plain IPv4, if available. Google's IPv6-efforts so far, while I could give them credit for at least have taken a few baby-steps, is by far the most cowardly I have seen anyone take. I find it very hard to applaud them.
    - zaphoyd 16y ago
      Lets hope "World IPv6 Day" goes smoothly enough that they can drop some of those restrictions. =)
      - trezor 16y ago
        Indeed. I wish, just like for Firefox, there was an extension which could tell me what protocol I am using. As far as I know, Firefox does not discriminate nor positively favor neither IPv6 or IPv4. So far, this is what has given me the best IPv6 experience, and I'm very disappointed Google/Chrome has decided to do their best to conceal from the internet that there are users out there, and that they are ready. IPv6 deployment is largely a chicken and the egg type of problem and IMO this decision doesn't really help.
wildmXranat 16y ago
There could some issues for home users such as me(Rogers internet): Error 105 (net::ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED): The server could not be found. Which is probably related to dns resolution.
- uxp 16y ago
  ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED is Chrome's DNS Timeout. The same error will occur if you navigate to a webpage without an internet connection.
  - pyre 16y ago
    Unfortunately this is true of 'localhost' when you have no internet connection if you don't pass the '--enable-ipv6' flag to Chrome. Oddly enough it also happens for 127.0.0.1, which it shouldn't be doing DNS lookup for at all.
there 16y ago
or go to http://www.kame.net/ http://www.kame.net/ and see the dancing kame!

mike-cardwell 16y ago

IPv6 really isn't that difficult. It only takes a few minutes to get a free IPv6 address from a tunnel broker and add it to your server. My websites and email were all dual stack less than 24 hours after I started looking into IPv6 for the first time. I wrote a blog post about it last year: https://secure.grepular.com/Setting_up_IPv6_is_Easier_Than_You_Think https://secure.grepular.com/Setting_up_IPv6_is_Easier_Than_Y... If you get a cert error it's because the certificate is signed by cacert.org and several major browser/os combos don't have their root yet.

mey 16y ago
A free tunnel broker isn't going to support the traffic of something like google. And an issue Google has previously run into is, clients getting the incorrect DNS entry and trying to connect across to a ipv6 interface instead of ipv4. This is one of the reasons why google had/has that ipv6.google.com dns name.
- mike-cardwell 16y ago
  If I wasn't clear, I wasn't suggesting that massive websites use free tunnel brokers. I was suggesting that geeks set up their own services with ipv6 capability in order to learn how it works so they know what to do when it becomes more important.
  - mey 16y ago
    Thanks for the clarification :)
btilly 16y ago
Congratulations. Now more people are unable to access your website and email because of known bugs with dual stacks than are likely to access your website and email through ipv6. The main issue are people whose setup says that they will connect preferentially via ipv6, who try to connect because their operating system has support for it, but whose IP provider does not have support. See http://getipv6.info/index.php/Customer_problems_that_could_occur http://getipv6.info/index.php/Customer_problems_that_could_o... for more potential problems you've created. Of course this is a kind of problem that needs to get fixed before ipv6 can be broadly adopted. Which is why this ipv6 days is going to happen.

Roritharr 16y ago

it seems my isp won't provide native ipv6 addresses until they are somehow forced to... -_-

AndrewDucker 16y ago

Now, if only my router supported IPv6. Sadly, it doesn't seem to come out of the box on any home-oriented routers.

simonsarris 16y ago
On any? My WRT610N ($160 on amazon) seems to work fine for ipv6.google.com and I have not configured anything. I would hope all new linksys are similar, but a quick search makes it look like the WRT300N does not support v6.
- AndrewDucker 16y ago
  I also have an WRT610N, but I'm failing tests here: http://test-ipv6.com/ http://test-ipv6.com/ I can also see ipv6.google.com, but I know my ISP doesn't do IPv6.
jbester 16y ago
DD-WRT firmware supports it in certain firmware versions. A little start up script hacking is required, but, you can setup a ipv6 tunnel through hurricane electric or one of the other tunnel brokers.
zaphoyd 16y ago
This is actually not true anymore. Off the top of my head all Apple Airport Express/Extreme/Time Capsule routers, DLink 601/655/855, linksys WRT610N/E3000. All support IPv6, most of those let you configure the router as 6to4 or 6in4 (tunnelbroker, etc) tunnel endpoint as well. The DLink ones even support a stateful DHCPv6 server to provide specific v6 address ranges to your LAN clients. The support on the most recent revisions often isn't just limited to firmware either. The Dlink routers have IPv6 ready logos on the box and instructions for IPv6 features in the manual. You can pick these routers up in your local Best Buy or Office Depot and the v6 support is not limited to the high end ones either. I am sure there are more than those that I have listed, they are just the ones that I have personally used for home IPv6 stuff.
- 16y ago

drtse4 16y ago

I'm wondering if one day, the real necessity to switch to ipv6 fast (after years of experiments) and the fear for possible connectivity issues will create a y2k effect among the population...

uxp 16y ago
Reminds me of the busysignal I'd get after dialing into Prodigy. "Please wait while we allocate an IP address for your internet connection."

steadicat 16y ago

Google: “Though IPv4 plays an important role in the Internet, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the protocol will be removed and our resources directed towards completely new technologies, such as IPv6.”

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- steadicat 16y ago
  It's satire. In some ways, the reasoning that led Google to drop support for H.264, if taken to extremes, could be used to support the logic of dropping IPv4. I was merely pointing out, in a funny way, the parallel between the two situations, and the absurdity of the original H.264 decision. For another example of related satire, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095993 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095993, which got 59 upvotes and made the front page.

zacharycohn 16y ago

According to http://twitter.com/#!/IPv4Countdown http://twitter.com/#!/IPv4Countdown, we will run out of IPv4 addresses in about a month. Won't June already be a few months past when we run out?

zaphoyd 16y ago
That counter is when global registries have allocated everything, not strictly when all useable addresses are in use. IPv4 addresses will never "run out", they will just get more expensive and complicated to use until the point where IPv6 is cheaper and easier. IANA exhaustion is just one big milestone along that path.
- zacharycohn 16y ago
  Ah, I see. Thanks for the explanation! I assumed that this was counting how many are in use/assigned, versus simply allocated.

apu 16y ago

After roughly 8 years, how do DJB's predictions/comments hold up on ipv6? http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html

requinot59 16y ago
"The IPv6 designers made a fundamental conceptual mistake: they designed the IPv6 address space as an alternative to the IPv4 address space, rather than an extension to the IPv4 address space." -- djb (emphasis mine) It's true that it would have make sense to embed IPv4 address space into IPv6!
- zokier 16y ago
  Kinda like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#IPv4-mapped_IPv6_addresses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#IPv4-mapped_IPv6_addresses ? edit: Actually, now that I think about it, accessing IPv4 internet from IPv6-only LAN should be almost trivial. Lets say you happen to have 3000::0 IPv6 network completely unused, which also fits the entire IPv4 address space. Then you could configure your DNS server to respond to AAAA queries for domains that have only A records with an corresponding IPv6 in your free block. Ie news.ycombinator.com(174.132.225.106) would become 3000::ae84:e16a or something like that. Then your router which is default gw for the hosts receives a package destined to that special network, it takes the payload and puts it into a IPv4 packet with destination decoded from the IPv6 address. It seems kinda obvious approach, wouldn't require any modification of the hosts or to the internet. Of course I don't know why anyone would want to run a IPv6 only LAN instead of mixed v4/v6, but maybe there is some reason to. Are there some problems that I haven't noticed? Surely someone must have thought about this before.
  - wmf 16y ago
    What you're describing is basically NAT64.
  - zaphoyd 16y ago
    This is referred to as NAT64/DNS64 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_transition_mechanisms#NAT64 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_transition_mechanisms#NAT6...) and is the strategy many mobile phone networks (such as T-Mobile USA) are taking. Effectively they give devices IPv6 addresses only and run a DNS server that makes up "fake" IPv6 addresses for all of the v4 only DNS records. It works well except when applications embed IPv4 literals (as they won't go through the DNS system and get translated)

gimpf 16y ago

Related: The Germany-based IT book and magazine publisher Heise (http://www.heise.de http://www.heise.de) did this back on 2010-09. The test has been such a success (practically no problems, for their share of readers, though) that they made that permanent. They wrote that those Big Guys had asked them on their experiences. Maybe this actually works out. (Source, German: @ http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Globaler-Test-fuer-das-Internet-der-Zukunft-1168595.html http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Globaler-Test-fuer-da...)

zaphoyd 16y ago
The Norwegian companies A-Pressen Digitale Medier (http://www.apdm.no/ http://www.apdm.no/) and VG Multimedia (http://www.vg.no/ http://www.vg.no/), both news publishers with non-technical audiences, had similar experiences. The IT group that helped them set it up published the results of their experience and brokenness testing here: http://fud.no/ipv6/ http://fud.no/ipv6/

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

moxiemk1 16y ago

Here at Carnegie Mellon University, we're allocated routable IPv4 addresses (and real DNS entries) for each MAC address you connect to the campus network with. As far as I can tell, I have zero support for IPv6. Autoconf doesn't work at all, and I'm unable to find any documentation about it. Sigh.

pavel 16y ago

Here's a start-up idea: an IPv4 address market/exchange (unless something like this already exists)

wmf 16y ago
https://www.arin.net/resources/transfer_listing/ https://www.arin.net/resources/transfer_listing/ (IPbay does have a nice ring to it, though.)
lookforipv6 16y ago
it's not as easy as that, and not very new idea. Some RIRs (Regional Internet Registries) do not allow that. you would need to find some legacy space to do it, which it may be hard. and then some buyers. also you only have a few years to recover your investment, by the time ipv4 is finished (not the IANA pool, but the actually stock from rirs), probably ipv6 would be a reality.